"Webbiquity" is about being everywhere online when and where buyers are looking for what you sell. It's what I help B2B clients achieve through a coordinated strategy of SEO, search marketing, social media, brand management, content marketing, and influencer relations, supported by the right marketing technology.

Inspired web designers continue to push the envelope on what’s possible in online presentation, utilizing HTML5 and design elements and techniques like parallax scrolling effects, imaginative icons and unusual typography to stand out from the ordinary and grab visitors’ attention. Any website element can be creatively designed and optimized, from navigation menus and forms to landing pages and 404 error pages.

Web design isn’t only about creating a visually striking site of course; designers also need to keep in mind factors like site load speed, user experience and search optimization. And with the rapid increase in use of mobile device browsing, sites have to be readily adaptable to different screen sizes.

So how does a web designer create a site that’s visually stunning and fast and user-friendly and effective at driving conversions and search-optimized and mobile-friendly? It’s a lot to keep with, but these 33 remarkable web design guides should help.

Noting that “There are many reasons to use a slideshow or image slider in your web designs as the key to smart strategic Web design is finding a smartest and interactive way to display your information to your visitors,” Dustin Betonio showcases a collection of “highly creative, beautiful and inspirational slideshows for your inspiration,” like winestore, Crush + Lovely and Fox Classics.

Jennifer Marlo shares eight critiques of brand websites from industry thought-leaders who share what they find unusual or effective about each site as well as what they’d change. For example, Thomas Mueller of Siegel+Gale writes of the Nike Better World site, “Beautiful fades and elegant transitions transform what could have otherwise been a straightforward linear experience into a layered visual exploration that links to Nike’s comprehensive digital footprint.”

In this wonderfully revealing rant, Heather Rast explicates why many business websites fail, and what they could do to improve, e.g., “Your web team consists of the super sophisticated, MacBook-toting college-age kid of one of the vice presidents. (as if a Dreamweaver course covered usability standards)…Your site uses internal language and writes from internal hot buttons to communicate with external audiences. Think mission statements, vision statements, core values…Awards and certifications abound. From 2008.”

What’s this post about? “Parallax scrolling in web design is the technique that features layered images that move around the website in different speeds/perspectives creating a nice and interesting 3D illusion. Initially it was used for creating an illusion of depth in a 2D video games and adding to the immersion, but now, with the help of well defined imagery, JQuery and CSS3, it can be useful in making your site look more vivid and creative. To your attention we’ve complied a great collection of 100 example of parallax scrolling effect.” These are cool.

Jamal Jackson defines parallax design as “the apparent displacement or the difference in apparent direction of an object as seen from two different points not on a straight line with the object. In web design use, parallax refers to the scrolling technique used to create the illusion of depth on websites,” then highlights examples of sites like Living Word, Dezignus and Art of Flight (which is truly extraordinary–take a look).

Typography in Web Design

David Wurtz explains how Google Web Fonts work, provides some examples, and notes that “The adoption of the web font technology has been rapid. Google Web Fonts now serves roughly 50 million daily requests[1], across roughly 800,000 unique websites[2], and is growing at about 30% each month.”

Daniel Waisberg reviews “techniques that will help Web designers and UI professionals improve their error pages in order to engage visitors and improve the experience,” including smart things to include on a 404 error page (company name/logo, explanation of why this page is appearing, easy navigation back to popular pages on the site), how to monitor 404 page visits and navigation, and tips for minimizing 404 errors.

Landing Page Design

Excellent advice, concisely presented: “A ‘Submit’ button describes what the system does well, but it doesn’t describe what the user does at all…The action button should affirm what that task is, so that users know exactly what happens when they click that button (e.g., ‘Create Account,” “Subscribe Now’)…The more focused your form is, the more likely you’ll get users to complete your form.”

Online forms don’t have to be boring, as shown in these remarkable examples from Foundation Six, Vincent Mazza and Justalab among others. A creatively designed form may increase your conversion rates—or at least get your form mentioned in a blog post on web design.

Andrew Pitre offers tips for improving landing page performance, such as #2, “Use Your Headline to Explain the Value of Your Offer – What’s in it for Me?…The best way to achieve this is to have a clear title. Specifically, you’ll want to make sure your title contains:

In this richly-illustrated and incredibly detailed post, Oli Gardner examines almost two dozen landing pages from small to midsize businesses and critiques each one detailing what he likes about it (e.g., “Testimonials: Testimonials and association with famous people/shows are included for instant credibility”) and what he’d change or test.

A half-dozen tips for increasing landing page conversions, from pre-positioning the cursor in the first field to be filled out and using eye-tracking data to integrating testimonials and driving to a single call to action.

User Experience and Technical Design

Noting that, in addition to the fact that slow-loading websites are annoying for user, “in 2010 Google decided to take site speed into account as a direct ranking factor”—thus making it all that much more critical—Tad Chef offers 30 tips for speeding up your site, from using smaller images and external scripts to switching to a faster web hosting service and limiting the use of third-party widgets on your blog or website.

The prolific Janet Driscoll Miller offers tips on several common technical design issues that can impact SEO and how to correct them, for example: “avoid using Javascript on key areas of your website, such as the navigation. Links contained within Javascript are also not indexable, providing a roadblock of sorts for the bots to index your site. If you’re looking for impressive menus, instead focus on using cascading style sheets (CSS) to achieve a similar effect.” She also provides tips for speeding the load time of WordPress sites.

Jessica Meher presents 25 “key elements for driving more traffic, leads, and sales,” like optimizing page content and title tags for search, using relevant imagery, writing copy that is clear rather than clever, and using calls-to-action that stand out.

Mobile Website Design

Mark Simpson supplies five tips for effective mobile site design, such as asking questions to determine what site content you have that is really relevant in the mobile environment: “Sites like Foursquare and Mashable have done a good job of making their sites accessible in the mobile world. What patterns do you notice? What website components have smart marketers left off their mobile sites? What features make the apps and sites more user-friendly?”

Acknowledging that it is much more challenging to test a website on every permutation of mobile device than on the far more limited number of popular desktop browsers, Amit Agarwal reviews Opera Mobile Emulator and Mobilizer, two tools that enable to designers to see how their sites will look on a wide range of mobile devices.

Two dozen examples of sites that use dynamic web design–web architecture that enables a single design to automatically adapt to a wide range of devices and screen sizes–such as Fork, Atlason and food sense.

Six design experts offer their advice on the difficult question of what website elements to eliminate in mobile design, such as this from Andrew Pautler: “I think the better question than ‘what should we cut’ to think about is ‘what should we keep.’ The answer to that question should almost always be the content. People come to your site for the content, so that’s what you should give them. The excessive navigation, oversized banner ads, 15 Facebook links on a single page, etc. are usually the things worth cutting when reducing your site to 320px..That said, mobile doesn’t and shouldn’t mean ‘watered down’…Creating a ‘mobile’ version of your site with limited content is not what the user wants. You can re-prioritize the content, but you shouldn’t hide or remove important content from the mobile version.”